The purpose of the paper is to analyze the influence of categorical meaning of nouns on synonymic relations in dictionaries of synonyms and the native speaker’s lexicon. The relevance of the study is related to the fact that the synonymy of nouns, especially concrete nouns, is not fully researched. The aim of the work is to characterize the synonymous relations of specific and abstract nouns based on the dictionary of synonyms and psycholinguistic experiment. The working hypothesis is the assumption that concrete nouns have limited synonymic groups and abstract nouns have wider synonymic groups. Our data is taken from the dictionary of synonyms edited by A.P. Evgenieva and the results of a psycholinguistic experiment on the selection of synonyms. 260 people took part in the experiment. Their task was to choose a similar word for the given stimuli. The results of the research have shown that in the dictionary of synonyms abstract nouns and person names as a separate category of concrete nouns have wide synonymic groups. In the speaker’s lexicon (presented by experimental data) concrete and abstract nouns have the widest synonymic groups. In the lexicon of the native speaker names are represented by narrow synonymic groups. Using data of the dictionary and experiment gives different results and is explained by different approaches to synonymy. The dictionary uses a system-centric approach, focused on the linguistic meaning; but native speakers use non-linguistic (functional) characteristics to synonymous words.